In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious reality to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t in the end consumer’s arms before January 1, 2014, they might already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s hands near the beginning of college if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a superb timeline for your complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s palms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it must be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just have to make sure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it can most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they are going to want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you want for gross sales depends on your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at an area pageant or different event? If so, then that gives you a deadline, however needless to say you’ll be higher off when you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event aren’t what you anticipate. Or maybe you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you should enable no less than two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you plan to promote, you should be sure to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Advertising does not have to add to the overall period of the calendar project – you possibly can and will begin marketing during the planning and production levels of the undertaking. Nevertheless, if you wait to begin marketing until you may have the calendars in hand, then you will have to allow at the very least a couple of further weeks, possibly extra, in your advertising message to reach the meant viewers and inspire them to purchase.
The production section of a calendar printing project starts while you hand off all of the images, text, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (sometimes sooner when you’ve got a selected deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you need to most likely permit somewhat further time – perhaps a month in whole – for manufacturing.
